Stealing Time

CHAPTER 2

A

t the same time down in Chinatown, Lin Tsing, a newcomer to America, a seventeen-year-old illegal alien, lay on an old blanket under the living room window, as far away from the other occupants of the tiny tenement apartment as they could put her. She hadn't been well, and now she was acting spooky, like a woman possessed. She had come home early from work, spoken to no one, and wouldn't answer questions. She had a glazed and empty look on her face, as if she had entered another world since morning. And they didn't like it one bit. She lay there in a stupor, listening to them argue about her.

They were afraid she was sick; they wanted to put her out. She could hear them discussing this. The men kept their distance. The women hovered around her, covering their mouths and noses to protect themselves from whatever ailed her.

It was not so easy for them to get her out, however. She had enemies and no friends. Their problem was how to go about getting rid of her without bringing trouble from many directions upon themselves. No one made any effort to hide the nature of their dilemma. Lin could feel the women huddling together, not too close to her, afraid of everything, not knowing what to do.

Mei, with the shrill voice, said Lin was bad luck and they should put her on the street. This woman was shushed by the others for being so outspoken even though everyone, except the two aunties, believed that if Lin were put out on the street, an ambulance with sirens going and lights flashing would magically come and take her to the hospital. They were sure of this because they believed that the authorities in New York did not like to have sick people on the streets. The discussions intensified during the late afternoon when Lin would not speak and get up again, even to relieve herself. She could have been deaf for all they cared. The two aunties gave her a few aspirin, but they had no other medicine to give her.

Lin let herself drift, welcoming the emptiness in her head. She had been sick before and gotten well before. In the part of her head that was still aware and could think about things, she'd decided that being sick was a good way out. If she was sick, she did not have to work. She did not have to show herself on the street or have anyone ask her questions, threaten her, or get her in trouble. Now her troubles were over. She would rest, and she would recover.

In recent weeks she had been telling herself a story about survival: She was feeling bad because being sick kept her safe from other dangers, the real dangers that terrified her even more than having a slight fever. As long as she had a fever, she was safe. After her fever left her, she would get better and then she would escape. Today, she'd seen her stupid cousin Nanci Hua, and Nanci had hurt her again, hadn't even tried to save her. Still, she would do what she had to do. If she didn't get better in a few days, she would swallow her pride. Once again, she'd call that cousin who hated her, and who was probably hating her even more now that she knew how bad Lin really was. This was Lin's plan. All this time, she had avoided telling the stuck-up Nanci Hua her troubles. Now Nanci would come to this apartment and take her away as soon as she bowed low enough and swallowed the shame. Lin wasn't stupid. In the end she would bow. She would do what she had to do to survive.

When Lin heard the women muttering about the bad luck that would come to them from keeping her, she wanted to say something to stop it. But her head was separated from her. She was in a place where speaking made no sense. In the end, she didn't have the energy, and she didn't care.

She had been in this place with Mr. and Mrs. Wang and the two aunties for ten months and had never let Nanci visit once. Other people lived there on and off—two people, three people, whole families. They went to work, came back, cooked over a hot plate in the living room because the Wangs did not allow them to use their two-burner stove. They shared a toilet and sink in a dirty cubbyhole, and a tub by the refrigerator. For two months of her stay there had been three young children in the place, bringing the number of occupants in the two-room apartment to ten. That had been the worst. The children had cried often and been scolded. The scolding reminded Lin of her mother, who had died in a country hospital in China almost two years ago. The memories of her mother made Lin want to leave the apartment and go to Nanci, but the aunties said she owed them after all they had done for her. Lin had stayed, and later when she didn't feel well, she was afraid to go to a hospital where she was sure to die, just like her mother.

Lin faded in and out. There was no doubt she felt worse than ever before. Right now she felt worse than she had on the crowded buses traveling across China a year ago, worse than when she'd nearly starved on the tossing ship crossing the ocean. On both buses and ship she'd vomited so many times from the motion that she could not hold down even a sip of water.

Last year the two Lao women from her home village who'd been traveling with her for many months, the women who insisted they were her aunties, had several times thought she would die. Every time they thought she was about to pass on, they would take for themselves her few possessions and her little supply of money, sent by her rich cousin Nanci Hua in New York. They did this so no one else could rob her when the last breath of life finally left her wasted body. In the end Lin always surprised them by showing a strength no one expected she had. She always recovered. Of course, the fact that she lived on meant they had to return to her what they had taken, but each time she survived, they gave back a little less. Some of her money was always retained by them as payment for the care they had given her and their kindness in keeping her alive.

For them, it was natural that Lin stay with the old auntie and young auntie when they moved into an apartment with the Wang family and the three other people who had been there at the time. They argued that she owed them much more than she owed her cousin whom she didn't know at all, and who had waited all these years to bring her to the golden shores and never cared for her when she was sick. The two aunties told her this so often that Lin believed them. She believed them because the fear that haunted her dreams was not of dying, but of living on and on in a foreign place where no one understood or knew her and where the cousin who was so different from her scolded and disliked her and would certainly have abandoned her altogether if she had known the truth about her.

The two aunties had been friends with her dead mother. So Lin believed the things they said about their kindness and stayed close to them, sleeping on the floor on old blankets in the worst place in the fifth-floor apartment, under the window where the cold air came in around the frame and gnawed at her all winter.

Now she could hear the aunties whispering to each other about the blood she sometimes spat up. "Too much blood."

She also heard them arguing the case for letting her stay where she was so they could care for her themselves. They said her mother had been their friend. She was like their own daughter. They had a responsibility to their dead friend to help her daughter and look after her. She'd always been a sickly girl, they explained, sick all the time. But she was a good worker. Once she'd brought home a whole ham, already cooked. At other times, she gave them expensive food. She paid the rent, and sick as she seemed, this daughter of their friend always got better in the end. Lin believed she was safe.